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spacetime coordinates: 2010’s UK
The Foreigner is a 2017 British-Chinese action thriller film directed by Martin Campbell and written by David Marconi, based on the 1992 novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather. The British-Chinese co-production stars Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan, Michael McElhatton, Liu Tao, Charlie Murphy, Orla Brady and Katie Leung, and follows a humble businessman with a buried past who seeks justice when his daughter is killed in an act of terrorism.
Escape Plan is a 2013 American action thriller film directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström. The first film to pair up action film icons Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as co-leads.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a 2017 psychological horror film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, from a screenplay by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou. It stars Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan, Raffey Cassidy, Sunny Suljic, Alicia Silverstone and Bill Camp. The story is based on the ancient Greek play Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides.
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Norway
Thelma is a Norwegian supernatural thriller film directed by Joachim Trier and starring Eili Harboe.
Thelma, a Norwegian student with a religious background, moves to Oslo, where she falls in love with another girl, and soon discovers that her feelings trigger inexplicable powers.
Mother! (stylized as mother!) is a 2017 American psychological horror film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, and starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer. Lawrence said that the film is an allegory: “It depicts the rape and torment of Mother Earth … I represent Mother Earth; Javier, whose character is a poet, represents a form of God, a creator; Michelle Pfeiffer is an Eve to Ed Harris’s Adam, there’s Cain and Abel and the setting sometimes resembles the Garden of Eden.
The film uses a dream-logic narrative, of which Aronofsky has noted, “if you try to unscrew it, it kind of falls apart,” and that “it’s a psychological freak-out. You shouldn’t over-explain it.”
Coherence is an American science fiction thriller film directed by James Ward Byrkit in his directorial debut.
Byrkit came up with the idea for Coherence after deciding that he wanted to test the idea of shooting a film “without a crew and without a script”. He chose to shoot in his own home and developed the film’s science fiction aspect out of necessity, as he wanted to “make a living room feel bigger than just a living room”. While Byrkit did have a specific idea for how the film would unfold, he selected improvisational actors and gave them the basic outline of their characters, motivations, and major plot points.
Byrkit told an interviewer, “For about a year, all I did was make charts and maps and drew diagrams of houses, arrows pointing where everyone was going, trying to keep track of different iterations. Months and months of tracking fractured realities, looking up what actual scientists believe about the nature of reality — Schrödinger’s cat and all that. It was research, but despite all the graphs and charts, I think our whole idea was that it has to be character-based. We want the logic of our internal rules to be sound, and we wanted it to be something people could watch 12 times and still discover a new layer.” (read more)
spacetime coordinates: 2054, Paris
Renaissance, also known as Paris 2054: Renaissance, is a 2006 animated tech noir science fiction film. The movie, which was co-produced in France, United Kingdom and Luxembourg, was directed by Christian Volckman.
Renaissance uses a style of motion capture animation in which almost all images are exclusively black-and-white; only occasional colour is used for detail. The film concerns a French policeman investigating the kidnapping of a scientist who may hold the key to eternal life in a futuristic and slightly dystopian Paris.
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